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Month: April 2018

I began the Buhler Family research effort in 2001 and continue today as time allows. It has been an interesting endeavor and there is yet much to be discovered. When I began my research I was surprised by the vast array of primary record sources available for putting together a family’s ancestry, some readily and some not, yet the records did exist. I often got side-tracked in the interesting content of secondary sources, such as newspaper stories, which provide interesting context to our ancestors’ lives. Online records have increased dramatically since 2001, facilitating the research effort greatly. It simply takes hard, time-consuming and often tedious work of stitching nuclear families together, one by one, then the preceding generation, and on and on.

Fifteen years of research has proved the pedigree of my paternal ancestral line which is now well understood and documented. Beginning with my father, George Lawrence, the Buhler paternal family has been traced back six generations to present day southwest Germany. My grandfather, George Henry, married Florence Lusignan of solid French ancestry. My great-grandfather, Charles Anton, married Martha Chestnut, whose family possibly descend from Scottish ancestry. My g-g-grandfather, Peter Anton, and his father, Johann Peter, both married, several times, into families of German ancestry. The first and subsequent American generations of Buhlers married outside their German heritage.

My mother’s ancestry has been loosely documented with the help of others, much more research is needed. Her parents were both of Irish ancestry as were her paternal and maternal grandparents and g-grandparents. The family names of Buckley, Brady, Conway, Lindslay, Kelly and Jackson all stand solid in Irish ancestry in my mother’s line. These Irish families did not marry outside their ancestral heritage. This quick analysis concludes that my mother’s Irish heritage is probably unadulterated.

Based on the foregoing discussion, a very simple and broad conclusion can be drawn about my DNA heritage. 50% Irish, 25% German and 25% French? How does this hold up against modern DNA analysis? In 2017 I submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com for an ethnicity estimate. The results from Ancestry.com follow:

Expanded results based on all regions Ancestry.com tests:

My AncestryDNA results also identified a possible connection with the Canadian Maritimes Acadians and the greater New Orleans Acadians Genetic Community. Genetic Communities are groups of AncestryDNA members who are connected through DNA most likely because they descend from a population of shared ancestors, even if they no longer live in the area where those ancestors once lived. [1] This result was not expected and will require more research.

Conclusion

The AncestryDNA results for George L Buhler Jr are in general agreement with the genealogy research conducted for The Buhler-Family. The west Europe ethnicity region does not segregate countries but includes Germany and France and areas of a few other countries. Note that many of the AncestryDNA ethnicity regions overlap, for instance part of northern Spain (Iberian Peninsula) overlaps with southern France, the area research has identified as the home origin of the Lusignan family. There are some low confidence regions identified by AncestryDNA which are not explained by the existing research results. The AncestryDNA results and the genealogical record confirm one another in the particular case of The Buhler-Family.